"... I'll bet you $10 that the primary reason people become "friends" or "followers" of brands on Facebook and Twitter is not to have a conversation with the marketer, but to get a discount..."

Harvard:

"What consumers really want when they interact with brands online is to get discounts..."

Brooklyn:

"... the marketing and advertising industries have been obsessed with the idea that marketing is a "conversation" and that consumers want a "relationship" with brands and companies. Of course, being the dick that I am, I've gone out of my way to ridicule this obsession. "

Harvard:

"In a study involving more than 7000 consumers, we found that companies often have dangerously wrong ideas about how best to engage with customers."

Brooklyn:

"Here's what people want. They want products that work well, look nice, taste good and are reasonably priced from companies that treat them fairly... All this conversation/relationship bullshit is just a distraction."

Harvard:

"Myth #1: Most customers want to have a relationship with your brand. Actually, they don't."

8 comments:

What will happen if more people end up agreeing with you, what will you change your name to?

In sales (which is dead btw, please add to your list) there is the same confusion and abundance of myths.

It is popularised today that the role of the sales person / new business person is to form relationships.

Recent research show that those who see their goal as forming relationships, aptly named The Relationshp Builder perform worse compared to those who challenge the prospect with insight and evidence, those that do this are called The Challengers obviously.

You didn't hear? In the name of truth in advertising, HBR is renaming itself "The Harvard Obviousness Review" or HOR for short. The full story is here: http://atomictango.com/2010/05/15/business-journal-makeover-enter-the-harvard-obviousness-review/

Your point is correct, but only when applied to toilet paper, toothpaste and soap.

What about those brands that do inspire conversations? How about the Yankees, or Harley Davidson, or BMW?

Trek Bicycles has 260k fans, and they're talking about bike events, and riding in the mud, and saddle blisters and god knows what...but it looks to be a conversation centered around a particular brand.

Considering the cost of managing the page is probably less than a quarter page magazine ad, and presuming that many of those fans/friends/freaks are (forgive me) evangelical about the brand, it seems like brilliant marketing.

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Ad Contrarian Says:

"Shakespeare was a storyteller. You're a copywriter.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business requires sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."